Clyde Hopper - The Outlands was an enjoyable experience to have worked on. It is a piece of IP that I had come up with a couple of years ago and I was pleased to take a piece of the story and make it an (un)reality.
In developing the level, I found a few things that worked for me. One off those was working on something I was familiar with. I live in a woodsy area with a nice sized backyard, mostly grown up and natural, and I see little frogs, turtles, bugs and birds; and I give them storylines of their own.
The process I used to create the level was that I created the whole level as an outline and worked on areas in incriments. Breaking it down part for part made it much less overwhelming.
This was a learning process and not everything was accomplished and not everything went as visioned. There are several reasons that I can see for this. A the top of the totem is that this was a virginal effort at designing and creating the demo. Most everything I was doing, I was doing for the first time; no matter how small a task, if I had no idea how to do it, it wound up taking days to figure out. This not only pressed back personal deadlines, but also cut into the Moddb release.
Secondly, the process was spontaneous..perhaps a bit too loosey goosey. There was a very flexible guideline for the level and had it been more than one person working on the mod, it would have just been unorganized chaos in gridlock. In working with the original plans for the map, I would discover halfway through that I preferred the gameplay went in a different direction all together at points. Other times I would come to the conclusion that with my resources, knowledge, and time frame; certian features would be more likely reached than others. Then there were the feature creeps...and they were creeping and crawling all over the place. Many of which were not implemented into the demo. (perhaps I will revamp the demo for a v2.0 including several of these creeps that were not featured thus far
Next time...
1) KEEP ORGANIZED - By the time I was at a point which I felt pretty good about the level, I had files all over the place. My desktop was covered with icons everywhere
2) DOCUMENT EVERYTHING - There were a few cases that I had done something within the engine, but I couldnt remember exactlly how I did it and blew hours trying to figure out exactlly what I did.
3) SET SCHEDULE - Working from home, you've got a house, pets, kid, wife, car...life to keep up with and they dont stop. Work out a defined schedule of when you will work on the project.
4) GO BIGGER - Going into developing a game, I don't want to be over ambitious, but each new project should display improvements in skills, confidence and ambition.
